Envy the Night (11 page)

Boone, a six-year-old bluetick, was the pack’s alpha male even though he
wasn’t the largest. Bridger (they were all named after famous woodsmen—Boone, Carson, Bridger, Crockett) was bigger in size, taller and fifteen pounds heavier, but he lacked the aggressive edge that dogs respected in a leader. He was a diplomat, Ezra had decided, whereas Boone tended toward the preemptive strike. Ezra felt closest to Boone, but he spoiled Bridger and tried to put out the idea that he was the favorite.

He cleaned a final fish, tossed its remains into the kennel, and then gathered up the filets and his knife, turned off the floodlight above the cleaning station, and went into the house. He cooked the fish and ate it with potatoes and carrots that he’d seasoned and wrapped in foil and cooked outside on the propane grill, ate at the kitchen table, facing the mounted head of a ten-point buck he’d taken five years earlier. Everything from the décor of his room to his clothing to his daily activity told him what he was, reminded him of it, pushed the essence of his life into him from the outside. He was a fishing and hunting guide, a woodsman, a local. His clients knew it, his friends knew it, his neighbors knew it. After nearly forty years, he was starting to know it, too. Mission accomplished.

You became what you wanted to become. That’s what Ezra believed. You could become it if you tried hard enough, could take what you really were and change it, force-feed yourself a new life until it became your old life, too, blurred together until a better self emerged.

He’d spent twenty years in Detroit and another four in the jungle trying to decide what he’d be if he could choose. Nothing stopping him, he’d move back in time, open up the west with Frémont and Carson and the others who were there, see this country in all the beauty it had once held. Reality did stop him on that one, and so he chose the next best thing, a life spent on the water and in the woods and far away from the urban world of greed and hustles and constant violence that he’d known growing up. He’d been twenty-five when he arrived here, a young man with an old warrior’s body count behind him, had no idea where to find a walleye, no idea how to track a deer or run a bear. He learned those things, and now he taught those things, and there were moments when it seemed that the perception of others—that idea that he’d always been here—was true.

He finished his meal and washed his dishes and gathered his car keys and went out to the truck. Took Cedar Falls Road to the logging road, went bouncing over the uneven track. Anybody else would spend hours, maybe even a full day, trying to locate that car from the land. Ezra was different, though. A tree that looked identical to the rest stood out as a landmark to him, each bay and
inlet and island as familiar as the houses of neighbors in a suburb. He knew the gray-haired man had taken the logging road, and he knew which fork of it he’d followed.

The road went on a good half mile past the point where Ezra brought his truck to a halt, but he didn’t want to drive all the way down to the water, have his headlights visible from the island. He took the rest of it on foot, the wet earth sucking at his boots. Here the soil was almost boglike, holding moisture long after the last rain had passed. The lake was surrounded by more than sixteen thousand acres of forest that were protected by the state, home to bear and deer and three wolf packs. Home to Ezra.

There was a boat ramp farther south, but Ezra knew people who used this logging road as a put-in area for canoes, saved some paddling time if they were headed north. You’d put your canoe in the water and take off across the lake, splitting either north or south around an overgrown island with a few
no trespassing
signs posted. The only privately owned island in the entire flowage, out of more than a hundred possibilities. It should never have been privately owned, either. Dan Matteson’s grandfather had won it in a bizarre legal case.

Matteson’s grandfather, a Rhinelander native, had owned forty acres of good timberland several miles east of the Willow and adjacent to hundreds of acres owned by one of the state’s major paper mills. When the mill accidentally clear-cut his property, he sued. The case had gone to arbitration, and the arbitrator had decided to award Matteson property of comparable value instead of cash. Back then most of the land around the flowage was owned by the paper mills rather than the state, and the arbitrator had issued Matteson a small tract on a point of land on the eastern shore and one of the only islands in the whole lake that was high enough to avoid regular flooding. The total land came to just under five acres, a fraction of what he’d lost, but the arbitrator argued that it was waterfront property and therefore worth more. Matteson had accepted, and now, sixty years later, there remained one privately owned island on the flowage.

Dan had grown up around here, and on long days and longer nights in Vietnam, he’d talked of the place. To Ezra, who’d never been more than forty miles from Detroit until he shipped out, the flowage had sounded like a dream world. Miles of towering dark forests, pristine lakes, islands. The island that Dan owned held appeal that Ezra couldn’t even put into words, but the longer they stayed overseas the more attached he grew to the idea of the place. He couldn’t go back to Detroit. Not if he hoped to avoid the sort of existence he’d left behind.

Just before he’d enlisted, Ezra had gone out with his older brother, Ken, to settle up a debt. The sum owed was four hundred dollars. Ezra had held the arms of an alcoholic factory worker while his brother swung on the guy with a bottle. When the bottle fractured, Ken had hit him one more time in the face, a driving uppercut, and the jagged glass bit into the unconscious man’s chin and continued upward, peeling a strip of pink flesh off the bone from jaw to eye socket. They’d left him in the alley after emptying nine dollars from his pockets. The next day, Ezra went to talk to a recruiter.

As his tour wound to a close, and the prospect of returning home became more real, Ezra made an official request to Dan: Could he head up to this place, this Willow Flowage, for just a few months, until he figured something else out?

You’re shit-brained,
Dan had said.
It’s going to be winter, man. Three feet of snow on the ground, you want a cabin with no electricity?

Snow doesn’t sound so bad right now,
Ezra answered.

Dan had agreed to it. He headed south for Miami while Ezra went north, Frank Temple taking his job with the marshals and landing in St. Louis at the time, right in the middle.

Miami ruined Dan. The Willow saved Ezra. Absolutely
saved
Ezra. It was hard living but clean living, where you invested your strength and sweat into clearing snow and starting fires, not breaking legs and wielding guns. And there were certain moments, when the evening sun cast a pale red stain across silent snow or when an early spring wind blew up out of the lake with a surprising touch of warmth, that made you want to drop to your knees and thank whatever God you believed in—or maybe one you hadn’t believed in—for putting you in that place at that time.

Ezra had been on the island five months when he learned his brother’s body had been found in the trunk of a Caprice off Lafayette in Detroit. He skipped the funeral. That summer, Dan and Frank came up for a visit, and Ezra made his pitch. He and Frank should pool resources and buy the additional parcel Dan owned on the point, build a cabin there and create a camp that they could share and pass down to their families. It was the sort of grand plan you can only have when you’re young and friendships seem guaranteed to last forever.

Go on
, Dan had laughed.
I’ll sell you the land, man. But I’m not spending much time out on that damn island, middle of nowhere and nothing to do.

Then sell it to me,
Ezra suggested, the island already sacred ground to him.

Dan shook his head. Slow, with some of the mocking humor gone from his face.

Nah
, he said.
I can’t sell that one. Not the island. It’s in a trust, a legacy deal, to keep the state from taking it. The island goes way back in my family, you know that. I’ve got a son, and it’ll be his someday. I want it to be his.

So he’d kept his island but rarely appeared there, and Ezra and Frank built a cabin on the smaller parcel around the point and shared some summers and memories. Now, with a few decades of separation, Ezra could look back on it and see that it had been the bellwether, Dan’s life moving in a different direction, to a place hidden from Ezra and Frank. The real shame was that it hadn’t stayed that way for Frank.

Ezra had lived in the lake cabin for a time, but as soon as he could afford to he bought more land a few miles up the road and built his own house. Eventually Frank Temple bought the lake property in full, put it in a legacy trust for
his
son. Now it had been years since anyone spent a night in either the lake cabin or the one on the island. So much for the legacies.

As he reached the top of the hill he left the road and moved toward the waterline, reentered the trees near where he imagined the car to be, and found it easily. Driven right up to the last tree, all those boughs mashed against it, bleeding sap onto the roof. He ducked beneath the branches, his jeans soaking in moisture when his knee touched the grass, and then came out at the back of the car. Reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew his lighter, flicked the wheel, and held the flame close to the bumper, so he could read the license plate.

It was local. Wisconsin and Lincoln County. That was a surprise. He memorized the numbers and then took his thumb off the lighter and let the flame go out. He hadn’t expected a local vehicle. The only people he believed should have access to the island cabin were some thousand miles away. The Lexus had carried a Florida plate, as expected, but now it was gone, and this old heap with a local plate had taken its place. Why?

He left the car and returned the way he’d come through the silent woods. When he reached his truck he decided to go the Willow Wood Lodge instead of home, have a drink and do some thinking before calling it a night. No tourists, this time of year. There were six cars in the parking lot when he arrived, laughter carrying outside. He walked in and found an empty stool at the far end of the bar, had hardly settled onto it before a glass of Wild Turkey and an ice water were placed in front of him. Carolyn, the bartender, didn’t need to wait on an order.

“Glad you came in,” she said. “Been meaning to give you a call.”

“Yeah?”

“Dwight Simonton came in about an hour ago. You know Dwight.”

“Sure. He’s a good man.”

“He said somebody’s down at the Temple place. Said there was a fire going outside, somebody sitting there.”

“Right idea, wrong owner. Somebody showed up at the island cabin.”

Carolyn shook her head. “Dwight said it was the Temple place.”

Ezra frowned. “I don’t think so. I was just out there today, had a look at it from the water. Nobody’s staying there. Been so long since anyone visited either one of those cabins, Dwight probably was confused. Heard something about the island cabin, got it mixed up.”

Now Carolyn leaned back and raised her eyebrows. “Come on. Not a soul who lives on this lake doesn’t know the Temple place, after the way that crazy guy went out. Dwight told me the fire was right down on the point. You think Dwight can’t tell a fire on the island from one on the shore two miles away?”

She was right; Dwight Simonton wouldn’t have made that mistake. He and his wife, Fran, had owned a place up here for more than a decade and were the closest things to neighbors the Temple cabin had. If Dwight said it was the Temple cabin, then it was the Temple cabin.

“You don’t think,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning closer, “it’s his kid?”

Of course it was his kid, responding to the message Ezra himself had left, but rather than confirm it, Ezra simply shrugged.

“That’d be something,” Carolyn said.

Yeah. That’d be something, all right. Ezra finished his bourbon without a word, tossed some money on the bar, and got to his feet.

“You going down there?” Carolyn asked, her face alight with curiosity.

“Figure I ought to.”

She was ready with another question, but Ezra turned away and went to the door, stepped out into a night that now seemed electric. First there’d been the beautiful woman and her gray-haired companion in the Lexus. Then the Lexus was gone and the man hid a new car in the trees. Now someone, probably Frank’s son, was back at the Temple cabin. Ezra didn’t like the feel of it, the way this group was gathering on his lake. He was responsible for them, he knew. A generation later, maybe, but he’d brought them here all the same.

__________

T
he letter was right where it belonged, framed on the wall beside the corresponding Silver Star. Frank read it while he drank his first beer, read from the date right down to President Harry S. Truman’s signature.

In grateful memory of Major Frank Temple, who died in the service of his country in the military operations of Korea, on August 22, 1950. He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die, that freedom might live, and grow, and increase its blessings. Freedom lives, and through it he lives, in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.

The letter had hung above his father’s childhood bed, the only tie Frank Temple II ever had to the soldier who’d died in Korea, leaving a wife six months pregnant with the son who would bear his name. Frank Temple II grew up without knowing a father but knowing plenty about his legacy—his name was a hero’s name. During D-Day, on beaches filled with heroic acts, the first Frank Temple and his comrades still stood out. Using grappling hooks and ropes, his Army Ranger battalion scaled the cliffs at Point du Hoc, stone towers looming a hundred feet over the sea and protected by German soldiers with clear lines of fire. Into the teeth of that rain of bullets climbed Temple and his fellow Rangers. Casualties were heavy, but the mission was accomplished.

A tough act to follow, but Frank Temple II had done it for forty-five years. He had his war, Vietnam, where he served as a member of a specialized group
so covert and so celebrated that it was still the subject of speculation decades later. MACV-SOG they’d been called: the Special Operations Group, elite soldiers whose chain of command seemed to end with the CIA instead of the Department of Defense. Temple II had matched his father’s Silver Star and Purple Heart, then come home to a career as a U.S. marshal, fathering a son who—of course—bore his name, his father’s name.